Community and Ecosystems Ecology

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Writing Samples

Here are excerpts from a few of my favorite pieces that I’ve written over the years.

“Even glaciers themselves are magical – living things that grow and shrink and move, and that hold snow when it should be impossible. Beneath a smooth(ish) surface might be a crevasse that could swallow you whole. Far below, rivers run into waterfalls, and even if the glacier appears to be the same size from above, they are constantly melting enough water to feed entire valleys below them. To a New Hampshire girl like me, this is goosebumps stuff.”

“Just how many other aspects? A team of researchers from Illinois and Singapore identified over 1,000 estrogen receptor binding sites in the human genome. While this doesn’t mean that there are 1,000 genes controlled by estrogen – not every binding site leads to a change in gene expression – it does indicate that the hormone regulates a lot of different things. It also means that ethinyl estradiol, the synthetic hormone, likely does much more in a woman’s body than simply stopping ovulation.”

— “It Shouldn’t Be At All Surprising: A Link Between Birth Control and Performance?” (full article)

“Hundreds of people flow past me. Maybe even thousands. Everybody and their brother is passing me, and their father is passing me, and maybe even their grandfather. A snail or a turtle could both ski faster than I am skiing.

“You have not bonked until you bonk with 30 k left in the Vasaloppet. Only then do you understand the true meaning of bonk.”

— “Give Me the Blåbärsoppa and Nobody Gets Hurt: An American at the Vasaloppet” (full article)

“While everyone knew that they were in for a battle, the minutes from the doping panel’s hearing, obtained by FasterSkier, show a full-on war, with Veerpalu launching protest after protest against everything from the HGH test itself to a typo in the blood sample’s documentation package. The minutes also show a misunderstanding between FIS and the Estonian ski federation, and finally, a harsh penalty from FIS that is almost without precedent.”